The Official President Trump Thread - Second Term Edition

Those are civil lawsuits. Who cares if they end up winning in court for a crazy amount of money. Taxpayers will be liable for the bill while the agents will stay fired.

Trump has already accomplished what he wanted to which is eliminating anyone who goes up against him. That's what these MAGATs want. They want all of us to live in a dictatorship worshipping their orange messiah

 

Leftist, your dog is trying to tell you something important.

 

What are you talking about? Your "side" is the government now. Fox, OAN, NewsMax, the Proud Boners podcast network, etc are all mainstream now!

 

Trump says Musk will examine spending at the Pentagon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-pentagon.html?smid=url-share

excerpt:

President Trump said on Friday that Elon Musk would soon turn his cost-cutting attention to the Pentagon, a vast bureaucracy that has billions of dollars in contracts with Mr. Musk through SpaceX and other companies he owns.

“He will be looking at education pretty quickly, and he will be looking at military,” Mr. Trump told reporters during a news conference at the White House with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan. “At military, too.”

The president expressed no concern about the conflict of interest. The Defense Department relies on Mr. Musk to get most of its satellites into orbit. His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies.

Mr. Trump praised the group of people who work for Mr. Musk as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has been orchestrating firings of government employees, including almost 10,000 at the United States Agency for International Development, which coordinates foreign aid and assistance.

“I’m very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they’re doing,” the president said. “They’re doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”
​

more at the link

 

this is good news. Hope they start with New York State

 

Trump wants a deal for Ukraine’s natural resources as ‘payback’ in exchange for aid stopping Russia attack: envoy

https://nypost.com/2025/02/07/us-ne...xchange-for-aid-stopping-russia-attack-envoy/

excerpt:

The US won’t repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War by failing to secure valuable resources from Ukraine in exchange for help ending Russia’s nearly three-year-old invasion, President Trump’s special envoy to the conflict exclusively told The Post.

“When you look at the mineral deposits in that country, we’re not talking millions of dollars. We’re talking — virtually every region, we’re talking about billions, and then some regions are [worth] trillions,” retired Gen. Keith Kellogg said this week.

“You can come up with a deal, and that’s what [Trump] has the Treasury looking at: ‘OK, how do you make a deal where aid is predicated off of the payback [of] precious metals?'”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday signaled support for a reciprocal resource deal with the US in exchange for security guarantees as part of a potential peace settlement.

“If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelensky told Reuters.
​

more at the link

 

For the first time i actually think Musk is the real president. Musk brought this up last week and got the WH to adopt the policy. That's insane for a anti immigration administration.

Musk really is running the show.

 

Trump says he is revoking Joe Biden’s security clearance
Typically, former presidents continue receiving classified briefings, although Biden revoked Trump’s security clearance in Feb. 2021.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...he-is-revoking-joe-bidens-security-clearance/

 

love him or hate him, this piece on Trump pretty much nails it

Regarding the Trump Roller Coaster Ride…[Expanded]

https://ethicsalarms.com/2025/02/08/regarding-the-trump-roller-coaster-ride/

excerpt:

I sure wish I could call it a blitzkrieg, but, you know, that Hitler stuff..

Lots of people are writing and thinking the same thing, but I’ll state it anyway: the way Trump has begun his second term is politically and strategically masterful, as well as entertaining. It is also unprecedented, with the only remotely similar example in American history being Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as he rushed to get control of both the Great Depression and the cratering moral of the public. No President has moved this quickly and decisively, however, or caught his opposition so flatfooted and impotent.

This is an experienced CEO doing what effective CEOs do best. It took planning, foresight, guts and learning from past mistakes. Here, a substack essay explains how it occurred. The writer doesn’t cite any sources, but it had to be something like what he describes. The critics of Trump who insisted that he was mentally feeble-minded—you know, like all conservatives—and a certain a disaster waiting to happen are being proven so astoundingly wrong that they are reduced to babbling, screaming or saying huminahuminahumina like Ralph Kramden when he was exposed to his wife as a fool.

Here is how you can distinguish the Trump Deranged hacks from the Trump detractors with integrity. The latter will say, “You know, I have to say, I don’t agree with most of what he’s doing, but this is very impressive. I didn’t think he could do it.” Here are the other kind are like Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson in their Times piece called “Falsehoods Fuel the Right-Wing Crusade Against U.S.A.I.D.” [Gift link!] It’s all the logical fallacy known as “The Texas Sharphooter,” as the authors choose misreported and exaggerated examples of USAID waste without acknowledging the damning grants that would be sufficient to justify distrusting the agency even if it had never given a penny to Politico.
​

more at the link

 

This is why Joe Rogan and other independent media rule

 

So fundamentally if you aren't impressed by Trump you are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Yeah, I guess that sounds like the definition that you guys have been using.

 

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/hamilto...8?st=GHXxFZ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Hamilton Would Smile at Trump’s Push for Accountability
‘Energy in the Executive’ entails the authority to impose consequences for poor performance.
By Allysia Finley
Feb. 9, 2025 at 4:14 pm ET

“Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 70. “A feeble Executive” leads to “a feeble execution” and “a bad government.” The Biden presidency proved the latter point.

By energy, however, Hamilton meant more than physical and mental vigor. He meant the power to act decisively, including to impose consequences for poor performance or misconduct. A weak executive, Hamilton worried, would paralyze the federal government, defuse political responsibility, undermine national security, and endanger liberty. This is why President Trump’s housecleaning, chaotic as it may be, is essential.

Democrats are howling about Mr. Trump’s removal of civil-service protections for senior career employees, buyouts for federal workers and firing of officials at independent agencies. But he’s simply restoring energy in the executive, which has been weakened by federal employee unions and civil-service protections.

It’s increasingly rare that anyone working in federal government is held accountable. “If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot,” Mr. Biden promised on taking office. Yet Mr. Biden was loath to fire his appointees no matter their blunders. He even let Martin Gruenberg remain as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. despite an independent audit last year that documented his personal outbursts and profanity against colleagues.

The audit also reported that nearly 1 in 10 FDIC employees complained of sexual harassment, discrimination or other personal misconduct in the workplace. One woman said she had received a picture of a senior examiner’s private parts. Another claimed to have received text messages from a senior colleague with “partially naked women engaging in sexual acts.”

None of 92 harassment complaints that the agency received from 2015 to 2023 resulted in an employee’s removal or reduction in grade or pay. Only two led to suspensions. Many of the accused, the report said, were “promoted to other executive positions or moved around to different regions or divisions, instead of being subject to any discipline.”

The reason is that union collective-bargaining agreements and civil service protections make it difficult to punish employees. They also make it hard for a president to execute his agenda, since career employees who resist directives from political appointees can’t be easily removed. Even Biden regulators chafed at restrictions on their power to manage their workforces.

Chairman Gary Gensler repeatedly clashed with the union representing workers at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The union filed complaints with federal labor arbitrators for discontinuing a pandemic program that let employees care for children during business hours and for his “irrational antipathy towards telework.”

“The union is being forced to litigate issues like this more frequently under Chair Gensler than under any previous SEC chairman,” the union’s president said. Mr. Gensler lost most of his fights with the union. A federal labor panel ruled in 2022 that he couldn’t require staff—most of whom earn more than $200,000—to work in the office more than two days during every two-week period.

The Federal Aviation Administration also ran into union headwinds when it tried last year to reassign air traffic controllers at its Long Island terminal to Philadelphia to reduce flight disruptions in the region. The FAA offered $100,000 bonuses and to cover relocation expenses for controllers who voluntarily moved. When not enough took up the offer, the FAA reassigned them anyway.

And there’s nothing radical about the Trump administration’s offering buyouts to federal workers and placing employees such as those at the U.S. Agency for International Development on paid administrative leave to get around civil-service and union job protections. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did the same during the Biden years.

As the news site Government Executive noted in June 2021, the CFPB “in recent months has offered separation incentives including early retirement and launched investigations into career senior executives to sideline them, targeting about a half-dozen of the highest-ranked non-political staffers at the bureau.” The bureau’s purpose was to “ensure it can install its own hires into top career positions.”

The dispatch noted that one CFPB career official was put “indefinitely on paid administrative leave” after the bureau launched what unnamed employees called a frivolous probe of “the executive’s hiring actions.” High-ranking career executives accounted for most of those who were pushed out and replaced by political hands.

Lina Khan drove 71 senior attorneys to leave the Federal Trade Commission between 2021 and 2022, the most in more than two decades. Mr. Trump’s buyouts and removal of civil-service protections for high-ranking career officials will merely make it easier for his administration to do what its predecessor were already doing.

All of which is to say that the partisan outrage over Mr. Trump’s actions is overwrought. All he’s doing is ensuring government accountability so he can better execute the agenda on which he was elected. Alexander Hamilton would approve.

Appeared in the February 10, 2025, print edition as 'Hamilton Would Smile at Trump’s Push for Accountability'.


​

 

[Bloomberg]Trump Plans to Unveil 25% Steel, Aluminum Tariffs on Monday

Yay.

Edit - behind a pay wall, here's the AP story.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-st...mport-duties-74d7bfde0da59e111a45e772d199f2b2

 

Trump starts term with positive approval rating in CBS poll

https://thehill.com/homenews/admini...rm-with-positive-approval-rating-in-cbs-poll/

 

We finna MAGA. Iceland will strike a deal first

 

The braindead boomer who spent 4+ years claiming biden firing the UKR prosecutor was the crime of the century. Trump firing Inspector Generals who are in the middle of auditing Elons contracts suddenly is labeled as "masterful."

The worst people in the world are disingenuous losers who cosplay as "independents." Tattoo MAGA on your forehead and own it

 

Haven't heard much from them lately. When is the AMAZING MAGA ceremony that everybody is talking about to welcome them as the 51st state going to happen? Is it next week, or the week after?

 

Only helped to drive a manufacturing client of mine out of business last time.

 

This is as close to virtual feces as you will ever see.